It works for me as you told on Linux. But on both W32 and OS X it wants me to register, though I clicked that blue "free" button instead of the orange "14-day trial" button.
For me this looks the same customer-harrassing of Real as ever. Am I missing something?
Oh yeah, and Quicktime streams never freeze due to network congestion, huh? Every time I've been watching QT movie trailers the first thing to do when the QT Player opens is to hit pause, as the software is so damn stupid that it practically never downloads a buffer long enough for uninterrupted playback before it starts to play it all by itself.
I hate Real's customer-harrassing policies as much as anyone -- they still require you to register for the download of RP10 for Win32 or OS X for example -- but these endless redundant buffering "jokes" are already started to feel more like trolls. IMHO, RP often streams much better than competitors.
No, flamebait shouldn't be disabled. In my opinion you can write biased comments reflecting your opinion, as long as you explain why your opinion is what it is, and don't just directly insult those opposing you. (If you do, then that is flamebait.) But you're right in that sense that the difference between flamebait and trolling on this section will probably be thin.
And about that US-centricism... yeah, beautiful colours, except that stupid flag up there. But if the topic of a particular topic happens to be about US politics, I can't see why us foreigners shouldn't be able to threw in our own 2 cents. The head-of-state elections of the sole superpower of our planet, for example, enjoys certain international interest -- and for a good reason.
OR they could just start to use a standard DRM scheme.
No, I don't mean that I'm any way pro-DRM. I'm definitely not. But if most major music labels (read: RIAA etc.) refuse to grant licenses to stores not using DRM, the stores just got to have some, or they're instantly out of business.
Standard DRM schemes exist and can be developed, however. An example of an existing standardised DRM is the DRM scheme that is part of the standards defined by Open Mobile Alliance and supported by most major mobile phone manufacturers.
The problem with MS and Apple is, however, that both seem to want to control the market to certain extent; Apple wants to hold control of both the music store business (so it seems) and the portable player hardware market (most certainly) with the help of its currently existing vertical monopoly, and MS wants to secure its existing desktop OS monopoly by locking as many people to it's proprietary audio codecs & DRM scheme which will only work on Windows.
Thus, no standardised DRM scheme for music files is likely to appear in the foreseeable future, as Apple and MS are both currently trying to knock the other one out of the market. Even though Apple is using a standardised audio codec (AAC), their proprietary DRM wrapping for it leaves little room for competitors, the only exception being reverse-engineering based solutions à la Real -- and then again, Real also has their own DRM scheme and you're still forced to use their software to play files bought from them. The reverse engineering was just for iPod compatibility.
So you think that 320 kbps is low quality -- oh wait, you actually mean that you didn't bother to RTFA. How surprising in Slashdot...
FYI: A quotation from TFA:
You can now rip music to MP3 format from WMP 10 directly, without needing an add-on (Figure). There's just one problem: Microsoft's MP3 encoder only supports 128, 192, 256, and 320 Kbps MP3 ripping. Because I prefer to rip songs to 160 Kbps MP3 format, I still need to install a third party MP3 encoder. Hey, it's better than nothing, and it's certainly better than the crippled MP3 ripping in RealPlayer 10.5 Plus.
Sure, VBR support & free bitrate selection would be nice, but I as the author said, it's better than nothing.
Well, I only spoke according to the latest OS X binary release (2.1.3) available on abisource.com. But perhaps the OOo support will be added to OS X build later, then?
I don't deny that people probably have great needs for Access replacement, but the most difficult Office lock-ins what I've seen have always been result of using Excel+VBA. You can do truly amazing things by building complicated spreadsheets and adding few hundred lines of VBA code. And when you have a larger organisation with tens of peoples solving operational problems with such solutions, It'll be a true PITA to switch, when all that VBA has to be rewritten.
Ordinary Word docs are after all a relatively easy move in that game - the biggest pain when switching from Word is likely to be retraining of even the most dumbass users.
On the other hand, Abiword isn't able to open OOo files at all, which could also be a problem. Sure, this isn't any problem for most users, who are swithing from Word. But in my opinion at least OSS apps should be able to somehow interoperate, as the formats are open. I converted from Word to OOo (back then 1.0 beta) in autumn 2001 when I switched to Linux, but when I switched to OS X a year ago, I didn't have any native OSS options (NeoOffice/J isn't native IMO), so I continued with OOo/X11.
Now I'd like to replace the word processing part of it with AbiWord as it is native, but can't do so as Abiword does not import/export to.sxw at all, and I have a shitload of.sxw docs already, so I now have a nice application lock-in again. Sure, with OSS I can theoretically do the filters all by myself buuut...!
And you're confusing Advanced Audio Codec and ACC.;-)
Anyone can put make an ACC file and have it play on the iPod. What anyone cannot do is develop or sell a DRM format other than Fairplay and have the iPod understand and play it.
Although beyond spelling your information is very insightful for all those "never-checked-any-facts" zealots on/.. Someone mod the parent up, please.
The real reason Real had to hack Fairplay instead of going with plain AAC is thus actually pretty ironic: The labels would never let them put the music to any portable players without any DRM, so Real was forced to hack Apple's DRM to be able to keep their own music files DRMed... (On iPods, that is.)
The service pack hasn't needed to be reapplied since the release of Windows 2000. IIRC it was documented in the "Windows 2000 Installation and Deployment Guide", a +1000-page book, which was freely downloadable from MS as zipped DOC files, at least back in the year 2000.
People take these things all too seriously. I have a friend who makes his living as a Linux kernel developer, and he has deliberately used the word "Lelux" in his emails when referring to Linux -- "lelu" is Finnish and means "a toy".
Though you're right in that sense that it is not a good thing when company marketing departments start to use this sort of FUD-style terminology, like that Linux is "anti-american" or Microsoft is "evil empire", or the like. They should generally focus in telling why their product is better and not just throw dirt on their competitors.
Generally, heavier cars == more mass == worse damages. Check this article to see the results of a head crash between a fully loaded tractor trailer and a tourist bus, when everything went wrong.
I've an 12" PBook, and I'm using it a lot while I'm reading -- mostly like a book, except the content is normally not local but something on the net. If I'm behind my desk that's all the same, but when at home, I nowadays quite often find myself laying on my bed, and the keyboard is nothing but on the way. I'd love to have a tablet with touchscreen (or just stylus-recognizing) LCD (with scrolling keys by it's side), which could be turned around and flipped over keyboard, like some PC tablets have.
Who would teach people on/. to read... I explicitly stated, that I never calibrated the battery of that Compaq I used in comparison. But yes, I've calibrated the battery of my Powerbook often. But even with a new, once-calibrated battery I couldn't get as good battery life as you.
Because the batteries of all other li-ion battery powered devices I've own, including laptops, have lasted at least two and half year before the battery must have been replaced. So one year is really poor. Even worse, that the batteries are rather expensive -- IIRC something like 167 € at Apple store. I don't like the idea that I have to throw over 150 bucks every year just to keep my portable still being a portable...
You might have some luck reconditioning the battery. Discharge completely until the computer goes into sleep, then recharge completely.
Well, I thought that was what I was trying to explain -- that that does not help. But may be it is as the other poster said, that with an old battery the output voltage varies too much for the meter to work properly.
I should go asleep, but I really have to reply to this...
My largest complaint about my non-DVI 12" PBook (1st generation, 867 MHz) is it's miserable battery life! When it was new, I got some 3,5 hours when the display was rather dimmed, wireless ifaces turned off and CPU usage remained low.
Now, when it is year and two monts old, I no longer can get anything over two hours. Also recently the battery meter has gone really weird, jumping from low charges to full during charging, and falling suddenly from high charges to zero when on battery (forcing the machine to sleep of course). I've tried running the battery full and empty tens of times, and also tried if PMU reset would help (it didn't).
I never had any problems like this with my former work laptop -- Compaq Evo N600c + W2k -- even though I never even attempted to do anything like battery calibration, and I hold it in a charger whenever one was nearby.
I also know that there are PC laptops, which have some +8h battery lifes, if you just replace the normally useless optical drive with extra battery, but of course Apple forces me to carry around that stupid DVD drive I needed last time perhaps sometime last week (and which I could extremely well just plug to FireWire port whenever I need it).
But well, somehow I have to bear this, as I'll give up my OS X installation when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers...
Nevertheless, laptops should have batteries like even the worst of cell phones: use at least one whole day carelessly, and then charge during the night.
Don't know about OSS, but to avoid Exchange, find out all serious competitors, OSS or not, search for facts about them, and tell your CTO to analyze them closely and carefully. Try to stress him as much as possible that as you currently do not have any groupware (assuming this as you only mentioned Sendmail), the cost moving to Exchange would include mostly licensing and HW costs -- but, if you ever want to move off from Exchange, it will be very expensive, as Exchange's data format is neither open nor standards-based.
Try to convince him that whatever your solution will be, it's source code must either be available for competitors, or there must be an otherwise standardised way to convert data off if necessary. Otherwise you will just have yet another MS Office-like situation, where you're firmly locked into a single vendor and are forced to pay whatever MS wants you to pay -- even if the competitors' products would be able to handle your basic documents, you'd still have to rewrite all your existing VBA stuff (for example), causing huge migration costs.
In short: one of your primary criterias when choosing software vendors should be making sure, that you're never migrating to something, from which you can't cheaply and easily enough migrate off later, if that would ever became necessary. Try to make this fact clear for him and forget all unnecessary OSS advocating, and you're much more likely not to end up being an Exchange administrator.
Of course, if that CTO of yours is a PHB and already lured by MS marketing sirens, he'll probably not listen anyway... but then, that's life.
Well, it seems that I should actually search harder next time... or even see vendors webpage, which is what I of course somehow failed do following the best/.-style, although I did try to Google for that issue.
You're just joking, but actually my first thought was, that the desktop theme selection was really bad for that particular screenshot, as if someone would've shown that to me as is, taken out of this story's context, I'd have automatically assumed that it is actually iTunes for Windows running inside Virtual PC on OS X.
"he'd purchased from iTMS using iTunes on Linux" is accurate.
It is, but I think the most descriptive for would've IMHO been "using iTunes for Windows on Linux" OR "using the Windows version of iTunes on Linux" (or the same with regular genetive form without "of"...)
However, considering the amount of typos I've already made on my replies to this story, may be I should just stop this nitpicking and shut up...
Slashdot Mirror
It works for me as you told on Linux. But on both W32 and OS X it wants me to register, though I clicked that blue "free" button instead of the orange "14-day trial" button.
For me this looks the same customer-harrassing of Real as ever. Am I missing something?
Oh yeah, and Quicktime streams never freeze due to network congestion, huh? Every time I've been watching QT movie trailers the first thing to do when the QT Player opens is to hit pause, as the software is so damn stupid that it practically never downloads a buffer long enough for uninterrupted playback before it starts to play it all by itself.
I hate Real's customer-harrassing policies as much as anyone -- they still require you to register for the download of RP10 for Win32 or OS X for example -- but these endless redundant buffering "jokes" are already started to feel more like trolls. IMHO, RP often streams much better than competitors.
In the meantime mod parent funny.
No, flamebait shouldn't be disabled. In my opinion you can write biased comments reflecting your opinion, as long as you explain why your opinion is what it is, and don't just directly insult those opposing you. (If you do, then that is flamebait.) But you're right in that sense that the difference between flamebait and trolling on this section will probably be thin.
And about that US-centricism... yeah, beautiful colours, except that stupid flag up there. But if the topic of a particular topic happens to be about US politics, I can't see why us foreigners shouldn't be able to threw in our own 2 cents. The head-of-state elections of the sole superpower of our planet, for example, enjoys certain international interest -- and for a good reason.
WM-9 is an open, patent encumberet standard controlled by SMPTE. MS did that so they could be a contender for HD-DVD and BluRay.
I've thought that only the video part of the codec is actually standardised, but the audio codec would still be proprietary.
But I might as well be wrong. Can anyone confirm this (links to some proofs)?
OR they could just start to use a standard DRM scheme.
No, I don't mean that I'm any way pro-DRM. I'm definitely not. But if most major music labels (read: RIAA etc.) refuse to grant licenses to stores not using DRM, the stores just got to have some, or they're instantly out of business.
Standard DRM schemes exist and can be developed, however. An example of an existing standardised DRM is the DRM scheme that is part of the standards defined by Open Mobile Alliance and supported by most major mobile phone manufacturers.
The problem with MS and Apple is, however, that both seem to want to control the market to certain extent; Apple wants to hold control of both the music store business (so it seems) and the portable player hardware market (most certainly) with the help of its currently existing vertical monopoly, and MS wants to secure its existing desktop OS monopoly by locking as many people to it's proprietary audio codecs & DRM scheme which will only work on Windows.
Thus, no standardised DRM scheme for music files is likely to appear in the foreseeable future, as Apple and MS are both currently trying to knock the other one out of the market. Even though Apple is using a standardised audio codec (AAC), their proprietary DRM wrapping for it leaves little room for competitors, the only exception being reverse-engineering based solutions à la Real -- and then again, Real also has their own DRM scheme and you're still forced to use their software to play files bought from them. The reverse engineering was just for iPod compatibility.
So you think that 320 kbps is low quality -- oh wait, you actually mean that you didn't bother to RTFA. How surprising in Slashdot...
FYI: A quotation from TFA:
You can now rip music to MP3 format from WMP 10 directly, without needing an add-on (Figure). There's just one problem: Microsoft's MP3 encoder only supports 128, 192, 256, and 320 Kbps MP3 ripping. Because I prefer to rip songs to 160 Kbps MP3 format, I still need to install a third party MP3 encoder. Hey, it's better than nothing, and it's certainly better than the crippled MP3 ripping in RealPlayer 10.5 Plus.
Sure, VBR support & free bitrate selection would be nice, but I as the author said, it's better than nothing.
Well, I only spoke according to the latest OS X binary release (2.1.3) available on abisource.com. But perhaps the OOo support will be added to OS X build later, then?
I don't deny that people probably have great needs for Access replacement, but the most difficult Office lock-ins what I've seen have always been result of using Excel+VBA. You can do truly amazing things by building complicated spreadsheets and adding few hundred lines of VBA code. And when you have a larger organisation with tens of peoples solving operational problems with such solutions, It'll be a true PITA to switch, when all that VBA has to be rewritten.
Ordinary Word docs are after all a relatively easy move in that game - the biggest pain when switching from Word is likely to be retraining of even the most dumbass users.
On the other hand, Abiword isn't able to open OOo files at all, which could also be a problem. Sure, this isn't any problem for most users, who are swithing from Word. But in my opinion at least OSS apps should be able to somehow interoperate, as the formats are open. I converted from Word to OOo (back then 1.0 beta) in autumn 2001 when I switched to Linux, but when I switched to OS X a year ago, I didn't have any native OSS options (NeoOffice/J isn't native IMO), so I continued with OOo/X11.
.sxw at all, and I have a shitload of .sxw docs already, so I now have a nice application lock-in again. Sure, with OSS I can theoretically do the filters all by myself buuut...!
Now I'd like to replace the word processing part of it with AbiWord as it is native, but can't do so as Abiword does not import/export to
The best value for Apple computers is to buy a refurbished model shortly after a new model comes out
...in case you happen to live in the U.S.
Try looking for those on Apple's other webstores than U.S. You won't find any.
You are confusing ACC and Fairplay.
;-)
/.. Someone mod the parent up, please.
And you're confusing Advanced Audio Codec and ACC.
Anyone can put make an ACC file and have it play on the iPod. What anyone cannot do is develop or sell a DRM format other than Fairplay and have the iPod understand and play it.
Although beyond spelling your information is very insightful for all those "never-checked-any-facts" zealots on
The real reason Real had to hack Fairplay instead of going with plain AAC is thus actually pretty ironic: The labels would never let them put the music to any portable players without any DRM, so Real was forced to hack Apple's DRM to be able to keep their own music files DRMed... (On iPods, that is.)
Well, since this is /., everybody is probably busy bashing either of the major U.S. political parties in this story.
The service pack hasn't needed to be reapplied since the release of Windows 2000. IIRC it was documented in the "Windows 2000 Installation and Deployment Guide", a +1000-page book, which was freely downloadable from MS as zipped DOC files, at least back in the year 2000.
People take these things all too seriously. I have a friend who makes his living as a Linux kernel developer, and he has deliberately used the word "Lelux" in his emails when referring to Linux -- "lelu" is Finnish and means "a toy".
Though you're right in that sense that it is not a good thing when company marketing departments start to use this sort of FUD-style terminology, like that Linux is "anti-american" or Microsoft is "evil empire", or the like. They should generally focus in telling why their product is better and not just throw dirt on their competitors.
Generally, heavier cars == more mass == worse damages. Check this article to see the results of a head crash between a fully loaded tractor trailer and a tourist bus, when everything went wrong.
I've an 12" PBook, and I'm using it a lot while I'm reading -- mostly like a book, except the content is normally not local but something on the net. If I'm behind my desk that's all the same, but when at home, I nowadays quite often find myself laying on my bed, and the keyboard is nothing but on the way. I'd love to have a tablet with touchscreen (or just stylus-recognizing) LCD (with scrolling keys by it's side), which could be turned around and flipped over keyboard, like some PC tablets have.
Who would teach people on /. to read... I explicitly stated, that I never calibrated the battery of that Compaq I used in comparison. But yes, I've calibrated the battery of my Powerbook often. But even with a new, once-calibrated battery I couldn't get as good battery life as you.
But heck, after a year why not buy a new battery?
Because the batteries of all other li-ion battery powered devices I've own, including laptops, have lasted at least two and half year before the battery must have been replaced. So one year is really poor. Even worse, that the batteries are rather expensive -- IIRC something like 167 € at Apple store. I don't like the idea that I have to throw over 150 bucks every year just to keep my portable still being a portable...
You might have some luck reconditioning the battery. Discharge completely until the computer goes into sleep, then recharge completely.
Well, I thought that was what I was trying to explain -- that that does not help. But may be it is as the other poster said, that with an old battery the output voltage varies too much for the meter to work properly.
I should go asleep, but I really have to reply to this...
My largest complaint about my non-DVI 12" PBook (1st generation, 867 MHz) is it's miserable battery life! When it was new, I got some 3,5 hours when the display was rather dimmed, wireless ifaces turned off and CPU usage remained low.
Now, when it is year and two monts old, I no longer can get anything over two hours. Also recently the battery meter has gone really weird, jumping from low charges to full during charging, and falling suddenly from high charges to zero when on battery (forcing the machine to sleep of course). I've tried running the battery full and empty tens of times, and also tried if PMU reset would help (it didn't).
I never had any problems like this with my former work laptop -- Compaq Evo N600c + W2k -- even though I never even attempted to do anything like battery calibration, and I hold it in a charger whenever one was nearby.
I also know that there are PC laptops, which have some +8h battery lifes, if you just replace the normally useless optical drive with extra battery, but of course Apple forces me to carry around that stupid DVD drive I needed last time perhaps sometime last week (and which I could extremely well just plug to FireWire port whenever I need it).
But well, somehow I have to bear this, as I'll give up my OS X installation when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers...
Nevertheless, laptops should have batteries like even the worst of cell phones: use at least one whole day carelessly, and then charge during the night.
Don't know about OSS, but to avoid Exchange, find out all serious competitors, OSS or not, search for facts about them, and tell your CTO to analyze them closely and carefully. Try to stress him as much as possible that as you currently do not have any groupware (assuming this as you only mentioned Sendmail), the cost moving to Exchange would include mostly licensing and HW costs -- but, if you ever want to move off from Exchange, it will be very expensive, as Exchange's data format is neither open nor standards-based.
Try to convince him that whatever your solution will be, it's source code must either be available for competitors, or there must be an otherwise standardised way to convert data off if necessary. Otherwise you will just have yet another MS Office-like situation, where you're firmly locked into a single vendor and are forced to pay whatever MS wants you to pay -- even if the competitors' products would be able to handle your basic documents, you'd still have to rewrite all your existing VBA stuff (for example), causing huge migration costs.
In short: one of your primary criterias when choosing software vendors should be making sure, that you're never migrating to something, from which you can't cheaply and easily enough migrate off later, if that would ever became necessary. Try to make this fact clear for him and forget all unnecessary OSS advocating, and you're much more likely not to end up being an Exchange administrator.
Of course, if that CTO of yours is a PHB and already lured by MS marketing sirens, he'll probably not listen anyway... but then, that's life.
Well, it seems that I should actually search harder next time... or even see vendors webpage, which is what I of course somehow failed do following the best /.-style, although I did try to Google for that issue.
But thanks for information!
You're just joking, but actually my first thought was, that the desktop theme selection was really bad for that particular screenshot, as if someone would've shown that to me as is, taken out of this story's context, I'd have automatically assumed that it is actually iTunes for Windows running inside Virtual PC on OS X.
"he'd purchased from iTMS using iTunes on Linux" is accurate.
It is, but I think the most descriptive for would've IMHO been "using iTunes for Windows on Linux" OR "using the Windows version of iTunes on Linux" (or the same with regular genetive form without "of"...)
However, considering the amount of typos I've already made on my replies to this story, may be I should just stop this nitpicking and shut up...